The Final Girl Support Group

The horror movies referenced in The Final Girl Support Group are slasher (also called ‘survival’) franchises: Friday the 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Silent Night, Deadly Night. Slasher movies contain certain elements that define the genre. There is always a Final Girl who survived the brutal and often gory attacks of a killer. The killing happens at a Terrible Place that will forever be associated with what occurred. The killer uses weapons that aren’t guns, which allows for more intimate killings. The murders are personal.

Slasher horror, unlike, say, paranormal or gothic horror, grew out of real-world paranoia. The killers in slasher movies are human beings, as opposed to monsters or beasts, which feeds into the fear that there are killers among us. Almost always, the killer has a backstory of abuse and trauma: Either the people who were supposed to care for the killer didn’t, or the killer is innately sociopathic. Whatever happened, the killer became a superhuman predator who keeps coming back. In these ways, slasher movies prey on existential fears about human morality. They address the tangible horrors of abusive caregivers, arguing that such mistreatment can turn a regular person into a twisted, degenerate individual.

Hendrix’s novel focuses on a specific trope from the slasher genre: the “Final Girl,” a concept coined by Carol J. Clover (Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, Fall, no. 20, 1987, pp. 187-228). Slasher films, considered “low horror,” or pornography of horror, tend to feature predation on young women who are viewed as attractive and sexually promiscuous. Much has been written about how slasher movies reveal societal mores about sexuality: The killer murders men when they get in the way or have sex with a woman for the wrong reasons; they murder women simply for being women. Often, the violence has sexual undertones. As statistics regarding sexual violence indicate, men are women’s number one predators—Slasher films represent this fact on screen.

Hendrix’s novel challenges the definition of the Final Girl. Historically, a slasher film’s audience is presumed to be male, and the camera’s eye tends to represent this. Most slasher movies implement the killer’s point of view, particularly during murder scenes. Hendrix’s novel takes place entirely from Lynnette’s point of view—the perspective of a Final Girl and survivor. Muddying the line between survivors of crime and perpetrators, at the end of the novel, Lynnette dubs Stephanie Fugate a Final Girl, even though Stephanie participated in the murders because Skye abused and manipulated her into killing. Through Lynnette’s perspective, we get a broader definition of the Final Girl.